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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

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Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#71
post #21
post #6

Some people like to claim that old storage technologies go away. But in reality old storage technologies live on along side of new... all that happens is that we end up having more tiers to deal with. Drum magnetic memory has been replace but we still have spinning rust, tape, optical, DRAM, SRAM, SSD...

There are only 3 forms of bit storage, historically. 1) Poking holes in things ( tape, DVD, etc ) 2) Magnets ( core memory, drum memory, tape, disks ) 3) Circuits ( DRAM, NAND, etc ) Examples of all three of these still exist. What's interesting about XPoint is it is literally a fourth form that has never been commercially available: melting a substance and cooling it quickly or slowly, forming either a crystal or am…

MO drives heated the medium to the Curie point. 3D XPoint isn't all the revolutionary.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#72
post #68

I am rather hoping this make large capacity DRAM some price drop.

I'll settle for NAND pricing to drop. There's a bit of large-scale NAND shortage right now. Companies are bearing the brunt of the shortage right now, but they'll past it on to consumers if it continues much longer.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#73
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YAGNI.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to phy…

Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us.

While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#74

At $5 per gb, I would instead buy RAM. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm currently doing image processing and using a ram drive with ~200GBs.

Have you considered write-back cache scenarios? Can't use RAM there. Stuff like this would be fantastic for those applications.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#75
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to phy…

Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

[deleted]

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#76
post #70
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really badly do not understand what EC2 gives you that a dedicated box doesn't. Yes, if you use all the other services, then there's a value but then again for example SQS is a particularly shitty queue.

> SQS is a particularly shitty queue. Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?

A million messages per minute ? How's that a problem? Please see http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/

Almost all of the systems tested hit 17k / s (aside from NSQ) -- on a laptop. NATS (gnatsd) hits 0.2M per second, that's a magnitude above what you need and that's a brokered system, if your task fits with a brokerless one then nanomsg is yet another magnitude. I do not particularly see where the problem really is?

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to phy…

Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

[deleted]

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#79
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies. If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to phy…

Or if you are a team like mine that develops/manages 200 servers, 15 RDS database instances, 500 TB of compressed S3 data, and provides accessibility to all of that through API's with only 5 developers because of how easy AWS makes it for us. While our server costs are probably higher than going bare metal, how many developers would it take you to manage all of that on bare metal hosts?

The expense of one's outlay to Amazon is not a persuasive statistic. It only shows that you have a lot of incentive to keep confirmation bias in gear.

AWS is specifically designed to maximize instance count (that is, cost). The reason "devops" has exploded since EC2 hit critical mass is that before EC2, people were reasonable with the number of servers they needed. With EC2, it's all water, and it's so easy to press "create instance" that people just do it without thinking, and wonder how they ended up paying Amazon $100k/mo for something that used to cost them $5k/mo.

I'm engaged on a project now that has similar figures to what you've quoted here. It could be done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers. I know because it was done with less than two dozen bare-metal servers before someone in the C suite felt left out and suggested some "modernization" via the cloud.

I think that cloud zealots are mostly people who were either deathly afraid of sysadmin or people who were cutting their teeth as cloud got hyped, because there's no way any competent person who was doing this type of stuff before 2008-2009 can pretend that Amazon is not laughing all the way to the bank.

This is not to say that cloud has no advantages or that its use is always inappropriate, but what you're describing is pure fantasy. Yes, a small team of coders should be more than capable of managing the servers that they need, especially if they are renting dedicated boxes from a professional datacenter facility that handles hardware swaps and similar failures for them.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#80
post #76
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SQS is a particularly shitty queue. Do you have any other recommendations for queue systems that can handle a million messages per minute (our use case)?

A million messages per minute ? How's that a problem? Please see http://bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/ Almost all of the systems tested hit 17k / s (aside from NSQ) -- on a laptop. NATS (gnatsd) hits 0.2M per second , that's a magnitude above what you need and that's a brokered system, if your task fits with a brokerless one then nanomsg is yet another magnitude. I do not particularly see where the probl…

Our messages range from a few KB to a few MB (we store a pointer to S3 for the large ones) but that look pretty interesting.

Thanks

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